When A Mans A Man | Page 5

of lush, dark green, native grass.
And, had the man's eyes been trained to such distances, he might have
distinguished in the blue haze the red roofs of the buildings of the
Cross-Triangle Ranch.
For some time the man stood there, a lonely figure against the sky,
peculiarly out of place in his careful garb of the cities. The schooled
indifference of his face was broken. His self-depreciation and mockery
were forgotten. His dark eyes glowed with the fire of excited
anticipation--with hope and determined purpose. Then, with a quick
movement, as though some ghost of the past had touched him on the
shoulder, he looked back on the way he had come. And the light in his
eyes went out in the gloom of painful memories. His countenance,
unguarded because of his day of loneliness, grew dark with sadness and
shame. It was as though he looked beyond the town he had left that
morning, with its litter and refuse of yesterday's pleasure, to a life and a
world of tawdry shams, wherein men give themselves to win by means
fair or foul the tinsel baubles that are offered in the world's petty games
of chance.
And yet, even as he looked back, there was in the man's face as much
of longing as of regret. He seemed as one who, realizing that he had
reached a point in his life journey--a divide, as it were--from which he
could see two ways, was resolved to turn from the path he longed to
follow and to take the road that appealed to him the least. As one
enlisting to fight in a just and worthy cause might pause a moment,
before taking the oath of service, to regret the ease and freedom he was

about to surrender, so this man paused on the summit of the Divide.
Slowly, at last, in weariness of body and spirit, he stumbled a few feet
aside from the road, and, sinking down upon a convenient rock, gave
himself again to the contemplation of that scene which lay before him.
And there was that in his movement now that seemed to tell of one who,
in the grip of some bitter and disappointing experience, was yet being
forced by something deep in his being to reach out in the strength of his
manhood to take that which he had been denied.
Again the man's untrained eyes had failed to note that which would
have first attracted the attention of one schooled in the land that lay
about him. He had not seen a tiny moving speck on the road over which
he had passed. A horseman was riding toward him.
CHAPTER II.
ON THE DIVIDE.
Had the man on the Divide noticed the approaching horseman it would
have been evident, even to one so unacquainted with the country as the
stranger, that the rider belonged to that land of riders. While still at a
distance too great for the eye to distinguish the details of fringed leather
chaps, soft shirt, short jumper, sombrero, spurs and riata, no one could
have mistaken the ease and grace of the cowboy who seemed so
literally a part of his horse. His seat in the saddle was so secure, so easy,
and his bearing so unaffected and natural, that every movement of the
powerful animal he rode expressed itself rhythmically in his own lithe
and sinewy body.
While the stranger sat wrapped in meditative thought, unheeding the
approach of the rider, the horseman, coming on with a long, swinging
lope, watched the motionless figure on the summit of the Divide with
careful interest. As he drew nearer the cowboy pulled his horse down to
a walk, and from under his broad hat brim regarded the stranger
intently. He was within a few yards of the point where the man sat
when the latter caught the sound of the horse's feet, and, with a quick,
startled look over his shoulder, sprang up and started as if to escape.

But it was too late, and, as though on second thought, he whirled about
with a half defiant air to face the intruder.
The horseman stopped. He had not missed the significance of that
hurried movement, and his right hand rested carelessly on his leather
clad thigh, while his grey eyes were fixed boldly, inquiringly, almost
challengingly, on the man he had so unintentionally surprised.
As he sat there on his horse, so alert, so ready, in his cowboy garb and
trappings, against the background of Granite Mountain, with all its
rugged, primeval strength, the rider made a striking picture of virile
manhood. Of some years less than thirty, he was, perhaps, neither as
tall nor as heavy as the stranger; but in spite of a certain boyish look on
his smooth-shaven, deeply-bronzed face,